I was surprised to find that slavery in Brazilian history was quite likely to have been more savage and more laden with death and torture than American slavery. Blacks couldn’t catch a break in either North America or South America.

Today in 1888 (121 years ago) Brazil officially abolished its slave trade – the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to do so.

Slavery and the slave trade dealt exclusively with Africa and
persisted for nearly 400 years. Brazil lasted longer than any other
Western Hemispheric nation, although the US South had the highest
concentration of slaves that the world has ever seen – 6 million on the
eve of the Civil War in 1860. Brazil never reached those heights, but it
used slaves in the same fashion as white southerners did. Not only was
slavery economically essential to parts of Brazil, but it also created
castes of human beings that persist today.